Telematics units within telematics-equipped mobile vehicles provide subscribers with connectivity to a telematics service provider (TSP). The TSP provides subscribers with an array of telematics services including, for example, call handling, stolen vehicle recovery, emergency notifications, diagnostics monitoring, infotainment services, and satellite-based navigation services. For many of these telematics services, the telematics unit communicates with servers of a TSP call center over a wireless network.
Users of the telematics units of mobile vehicles are often driving or riding in a moving vehicle, and the users of the telematics units generally rely on delivery of voice commands to the telematics unit. The telematics unit similarly communicates with the users using audio feedback, often in the form of speech generated by a text-to-speech (TTS) engine of the telematics unit. For example, a user may issue a simple voice command to the telematics unit (e.g., “call [contact]”), and the telematics unit may respond with a short confirmation using the local TTS engine (e.g., “calling [contact]”). In another example, the user receives a text message via the telematics unit and chooses to have the content of the text message played back as an audio signal by the telematics unit, which uses the local TTS engine to convert text content of the text message into an audio format for playback by the vehicle.
A shortcoming of these conventional telematics systems is that the local TTS engine of the telematics unit tends to be limited in terms of memory, and thus is limited with respect to the level of speech quality is able to be achieved by the local TTS engine. Particularly for relatively long text content (e.g., involving complete and/or compound sentences), audio renderings generated by the local TTS engine may sound awkward, robotic, or unintelligible to the listener.